Slackistan (Hammad Khan, Pakistan, 2009)

Three young guys chill outside a café on a public square. A beautiful, warm sunny day. Behind them, a fountain propels jets of water into the air, creating spiralling parabolas. The circular glass table in front of them is clear, except for cigarettes and lighters. They sit in silence. Hasan, from time to time, checks out his blackberry, but no one has contacted him. Saad – wearing a white hoody emblazoned with ‘Horny Devil’ – twirls a dead leaf backwards, then forwards, between his fingers. Sherry has been watching people passing by. He glances at Hasan, then at Saad, sitting either side of him. Leaning back in his chair, he sighs, yawns, stretches. This is Slackistan – an indy slacker flick set in Islamabad, a few days in the limbo-lives of five middleclass friends a year after of graduating college. There is Sherry: he is skating on thin ice, clocking up debts, borrowing cash from a money lender to sustain a lifestyle above and beyond his means – out-and-about, a flash car, the latest mobile. There is Saad: he has little aspiration, and is seemingly happy to be drifting through life, although there is always some girls to be checking out. There is Aisha: she is looking for marriage, a wealthy man, so she can continue doing nothing but with more style. There is Xara / Zara: she is mixed up, confused, melancholic, rebellious. And at the centre and describing the circumference of the film, Hasan. Slackistan is Hasan’s story – or rather, the lives of the five friends as seen from Hasan’s perspective. Director Hammad Khan will create a mosaic of images: short scenes of conversations which go nowhere; a character wandering the streets on their own; trying on different clothes in the mirror before being able to step out; staring absentmindedly over the cityscape from the hills or tall buildings. In voice-over, Hasan will comment upon these images, even if he is not present, not only providing a narrative cohesion to the film but also interrogating their slacker lifestyle. In this way, Hasan’s reflections are an immediate evaluation of the narration. Such reflection is the foundation and inspires the constitution of Slackistan...

Sherry glances at Hasan, then at Saad, sitting either side of him. Leaning back in his chair, he sighs, yawns, stretches: ‘I am so bored.’...

Slackistan is a film – as Deleuze would comment – populated by ‘weaklings and idiots’ (C1:184). Where ‘landscapes are dwarfed or flattened, they turn sad and dismal, even tend to disappear’ (C1:184-5). Where ‘[t]he beings who frequent’ such spaces ‘no longer have Visions’ (C1:185). Slackistan  is a figure of enfeeblement, the characters are reduced to 'tiny point[s] fleeing towards the horizon' (C1:185)...

To read the full exploration of Slackistan through the Deleuze's sign of the 'figure of enfeeblement,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...